Oh sure, let’s tax the drivers who are conserving energy to subsidize the Humvees:
WASHINGTON — Taxing hybrids and other fuel-efficient cars and billing drivers for miles driven are among the approaches being suggested to avert a shortfall in money to maintain the nation’s highways.
Less than four months after President Bush signed a six-year, $286.4 billion [...]

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I do love Julia:
I know I can’t think of a more appropriate way to celebrate itinerant agricultural workers being the first to hear that the Son of God was born in a stable because His family was in town to render unto Caesar than trampling your fellow man to get cheap consumer crap manufactured by [...]

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You know, I feel sorry for these people. I suspect they know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

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Of course he was acting on his own! Who would think otherwise?
The attorney general mounted a robust defence yesterday of his advice to newspapers that they risked breaching the Official Secrets Act if they published details from a confidential memo reportedly detailing a conversation between George Bush and Tony Blair.
Lord Goldsmith insisted he was acting [...]

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My tradition is to spend the day after Thanksgiving with an old friend and her family. We were sitting at her sumptuous spread of leftovers and talking politics.
Her husband, a retired NYC cop and Vietnam vet, was shocked when I told him we were using napalm and white phosphorus on civilians during the seige of [...]

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You know, I’ve noticed this theme, too. Like, why are these stories news all of a sudden - because women with money and power are finally getting the short end of the “responsibility” stick that’s normally jammed up the asses of working-class and poor women?
Gee. Maybe now they’ll even start to understand the point of [...]

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New polling numbers show Casey leading Santorum in all areas of the state.

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Melanie, who lives and breathes this stuff, speaks on the possibility of an avian flu pandemic:
Let me make a few things plain: the experts I consult are deeply divided on the probability of a pandemic flu, but none of them think that the probability is zero. Some think it is highly likely in the [...]

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Josh Marshall on the Abramoff scandal and whether Democrats will be caught in the mix:
DiGenova notwithstanding, the lawyers at the Public Integrity Section at DOJ (just now coming under the gun from DiGenova and his pals) are doing a pretty decent finding cases where even the normal rules of the road in Washington were trashed [...]

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Via E&P:
NEW YORK - A lengthy report by Gabriel Sherman in this week’s New York Observer offers several revelations, and criticism from unnamed sources, concerning that crucial period at The New York Times in 2002 when the newspaper advanced flawed information about WMD in Iraq.
As the piece points out, Publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., [...]

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And yet, no one had time to check out the reasons we went to war in Iraq. Hmm:
Gov. Bill Richardson is coming clean on his draft record — the baseball draft, that is, admitting that his claim to have been a pick of the Kansas City A’s in 1966 was untrue.
For nearly four decades, Richardson, [...]

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Should be interesting:
NEW YORK Saying U.S. newspapers “are afraid to talk truth to power,” Craigslist founder Craig Newmark hinted that he’s about to launch a major online journalism project within the next few months that will copy the successful “wisdom of the masses” approach to classified advertising and apply it to journalism.
Newmark made his remarks [...]

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I kid you not:
DENVER - Former FEMA Director Michael Brown, heavily criticized for his agency’s slow response to Hurricane Katrina, is starting a disaster preparedness consulting firm to help clients avoid the sort of errors that cost him his job.

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“So I was talking to this girl on the phone, and she says ‘Happy Turkey Day’ and I’m like, that’s the final strike, you’re out,” Joe said. He is drinking beer and doing shots of tequila for his sciatica pain.
“You actually said that to her?” I say. “The final strike?”
“No, I didn’t say it [...]

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A bunch of us were talking the other day, and two of them had wonderful boyfriends/husbands named Steve.
“All Steves are great,” one of them enthused.
“Oh, come on, not all of them,” I said. But then I started to think: my oldest friend is married to a Steve, and she says the same thing. (Although she [...]

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“Preznit give me turkee.” Still cracks me up.

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Writer Anne LaMott says there are really only two prayers: “Help me, help me, help me” and “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
This has been one of those “thank you” years.
I got a job, a real one. My dad’s stable and doing well. I have such great friends, and things look pretty good. I’m rebuilding [...]

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Welcome to the Regime:
The Bush administration, determined not to yield any ground on the constitutional issues in the case of Jose Padilla , has indicated it may still hold the accused “enemy combatant� indefinitely—even if he is acquitted of the terrorist conspiracy charges he was indicted on this week.
Jonathan Freiman, a lawyer for Padilla, told [...]

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From Richard Cranium at All Spin Zone:
It’s been an unprecedented year for charitable organizations. From the tsunami response at the beginning of 2005, through Katrina, and then the earthquake devastation in Pakistan, it’s been a year that would (in the best of times) tax the resources of any NGO.
On this Thanksgiving in the U.S., and [...]

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No one has ever proved pregnancy ultrasounds to be safe. That’s why they’re not supposed to be used like toys.

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Blogger Mike Petrelis made a FOIA request of the Pentagon, asking for a log of all FOIA requests made by the media in the past five years.
Apparently our journalist heroes are singularly lacking in curiousity…

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So we were sitting around at DL last night, talking about the comedy that is Pajamas Media Open Source Media Pajamas Media. (We were also trying to figure out how to get funding for a blogger ethics conference in Venezuela, but I digress.)
Anyway, everyone started throwing around ideas for a liberal version of Pajamas Media. [...]

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The check is in the mail, let’s do lunch, I won’t come in your mouth…
Moving to defend the Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito Jr. against attacks on his stance on civil rights, the White House said Tuesday that he had assured senators last week of his commitment to the principle of one person one [...]

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Coming attractions in the Abramoff investigation:
If Scanlon keeps singing, there could be a lot of “victims” in Washington soon. Sources close to the federal investigation tell the Washington Post that investigators “are looking at half a dozen members of Congress, current and former senior Hill aides, a former deputy secretary of the interior, and Abramoff’s [...]

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More on Bush’s reported desire to bomb al-Jazeera:
Sir Menzies Campbell, foreign affairs spokesman for the opposition Liberal Democrats, said Tuesday that, if true, the memo was worrying.
“If true, then this underlines the desperation of the Bush administration as events in Iraq began to spiral out of control,” he said. “On this occasion, the prime minister [...]

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In the midst of all the madness, it’s nice to read a story like this:
When the volunteers began cooking, famished storm victims emerged out of nowhere. Some were naked, having lost every stitch of clothing to Katrina. All were so hungry that the Texans began running out of food. They decided to pray.
“We thought we’d [...]

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WashPo editorial on Porter Goss’s re-definition of torture:
But Mr. Goss’s statements suggest a deeper problem. Even if the legislation passes — and Mr. Bush has threatened a veto — the CIA will be led by an administration that has redefined standard torture techniques as “unique and innovative ways” of collecting information. No one beyond Mr. [...]

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Somehow, CNN, WashPo and the Times will figure out a way to make Bush the victim in all this. From Murray Waas:
Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence [...]

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He never said such a thing - but if he did, he was just kidding, honest:
NEWSPAPERS editors were threatened with prosecution under the Official Secrets Act last night if they published details of a conversation between Tony Blair and George Bush in which the President is alleged to have suggested bombing al-Jazeera, the Arab news [...]

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From Philly Indy Media:
I speak my mind; I used to not. A typical day, you work yourself to death, get tired, go home tired, come back tired… I’ve been here five years. They’re not even meeting the cost of living. Five years. I’m not even making nine dollars an hour yet. I have no heat [...]

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